Diary: Abortion in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Diary:Abortion in Northern Ireland Joanna Biggs (bio) "Diary: Abortion in Northern Ireland" is a nonfiction journalistic piece written by writer and editor Joanna Biggs that was originally published in the London Review of Books on 17 August 2017 and is reproduced here with permission. It provides an account of abortion illegality in Northern Ireland, capturing the tenors and restrictive sinews of the time before the 2019 lifting of restrictions in Northern Ireland. We present it here as a snapshot of this era, with one of the aims of the diary to capture some of the different discursive registers at play, including public and media representations of abortion. Biggs's piece traces the financial, physical, and mental challenges as well as the confrontations and falsities that women in Northern Ireland are forced to face when trying to access reproductive health care and abortion services. It explores the support systems that they can utilize, including the procuring of abortion pills, and she documents some organizations in the United Kingdom that help with financial and practical travel arrangements. In this way the essay functions on a number of important levels at once: as activist journalism calling for the need for widespread abortion services in Northern Ireland; as an informational piece that provides women with some details about abortion options in a restrictive climate and place as a brief historical and contemporary account of the legal and political landscape of Northern Ireland; and as a personal reflection on storytelling and its importance as a transformative device. ________ There is one abortion clinic in Northern Ireland: a Marie Stopes clinic on Great Victoria Street, which joins the two-up two-down red brick terraces of the Lisburn Road, where Ulster banners fly from the lampposts, to the City Hall with its eau-de-nil dome and pale-stone statue of Queen Victoria. The clinic isn't easy to find: the signs beside the door at No. 14 are for BioKinetic Europe, which runs clinical [End Page 232] trials, MKB Law, and Bupa; next door there's a Tesco Express and Boojum, a "Mexican burrito bar." Danielle Roberts, an abortionrights activist with Alliance for Choice, says that on the days the clinic is open—Thursdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m.—you can't miss it: members of the pressure group Precious Life are always outside. ("We are saving babies, mothers, and indeed this country from the silent holocaust that is brutally destroying fifty million lives worldwide every year.") Danielle acts as an escort for women with appointments on the eighth floor: two activists for every woman, one wearing a "body cam, as there have been assaults and harassment." Abortion, or assisting abortion, is a crime in the United Kingdom: the 1967 Abortion Act that applies in England, Wales, and Scotland gets round this with provisos that allow abortion to be lawfully performed: if the pregnancy is still under twenty-four weeks and two doctors agree that there would be "grave permanent injury" to the "physical or mental health of the pregnant woman," or serious danger to the child. In Northern Ireland, which never adopted the 1967 act, the 1861 Offences against the Person Act—the one that imprisoned Oscar Wilde—substitutes for it. Any pregnant woman "with intent to procure her own miscarriage … shall be guilty of felony … and being convicted thereof shall be liable … to be kept in penal servitude for life" (this remains the maximum penalty). There have been amendments over the years—case law shows that abortion is lawful in Northern Ireland in exceptional circumstances—but nothing to make abortion legal in cases of rape, for instance, has ever been put on the statute book, and successive iterations of medical guidelines haven't made it clear under what conditions doctors would be acting legally (or illegally) when performing an abortion. And there seems to be no political will to make the situation clear: only the Green Party and the People Before Profit Alliance support decriminalization; Sinn Fein wants "limited reform"; but the Alliance Party claim abortion is a matter of individual conscience and the DUP are openly pro-life. To make things worse...